Many a fine old home near the English coast was built on the proceeds of a venturer, one who put up the smuggling capital but kept well in the background, leaving the risks to the captain and the lander. The captain purchased his goods quite legally abroad and then waited for a dark night to run them across to one of several spots the lander might arrange. The lander arranged with the local farmhands for transport, with the local parson, perhaps for storage in the church, and for eventual sales. Besides the venturer, very often the only principal in the whole business who could read and write was the quill driver, the man who kept the accounts. Eternal vigilance is, to be sure, the price of law breaking if it is to be successful for long, and this is but one of the ways tea smuggling was carried on from 1680, the year of the tax, until 1784, the year of its repeal. In 1733, no less than fifty-four thousand pounds of bootleg tea were seized; present-day American consumption of illegally imported drugs can give us some idea of how much was not.

The smugglers succeeded mainly because they had the sympathy of the whole countryside. On the Isle of Man they often unloaded as much tea and brandy as a hundred horses could carry, and stored their contraband in large caves no revenue man ever managed to discover because, as a pious old Manxman said, “Who’d ever be so wicked as to tell them?” The free traders knew every time a coast guard craft went into drydock, or when a riding officer had the gout or planned a raid. The country folks dealt with the smugglers less for the sake of getting luxuries cheap than of getting them at all. But the larger the band, the more contraband, and the more overawed the revenuers and the populace. The day of the small-scale free trader had passed well before the mid-1700′s. And as the business grew, as rich men found it profitable to own three or four sloops engaged in illegal traffic, it became the part of wisdom to know nothing of what went on, as a ballad of the day recommends:

Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark;
Brandy for the Parson,
‘Baccy for the Clerk,
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling,
While the gentlemen go by.